When doctors won't tell . . .
Of all the online nutritional information, nutritional facts, medical and
dietary sites there are to choose from, in an article entitled "How
to ease the pain" The Sunday Times magazine,
Culture, published a list of just five websites it
considered reliable and informative.This site was one of that five.

CONDITIONS
AND DISEASES PREVENTED AND HELPED BY A LOW-CARB, HIGH-FAT DIET

Phytosterols

The new breed of wonderchemicals?

Phytosterols are natural plant estrogens.
Because of their reputations in folk lore as abortifacients, menstrual
cycle disruptors and ecbolic (hastening labour or miscarriage) agents
and are known to stimulate uterine tissue and have hormonal influences
on the reproductive tract, the World Health Organisation sponsored
a huge study to investigate "Natures Contraceptives".
This can be accessed through the April and May 1975 issues of the
Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences including Farnsworth
et al. 1975a, Farnsworth
et al. 1975b.

The study concluded that

"If one inspects
the structures of the estrogenic sterols, one can see a striking
similarity of the skeletal structures of these compounds with the
structure of the synthetic estrogen diethylstilbestrol".

The sterol estrogens were found to
be of the highest order of estrogenic activity, followed by the
coumestrols and then the isoflavones.

For instance, researchers at Duke
University Division of Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility
found "Beta-sitosterol may compete with cholesterol and interfere
with the synthesis of gonadal steroid hormones...and may create
a neonatal environment with low endogenous levels of estrogens....The
hormonal environment during the critical period exerts permanent
organisational effects that may affect the behaviour in adult animals.

Further Reading

Myriam Richelle and colleagues from
the Nestle Research Centre, Switzerland, have discovered that adding
plant sterols to foods to reduce the absorption of cholesterol,
also reduces the absorption of beta-carotene and vitamin E (alpha-tocopherol).¯
However, the sterols did not significantly reduce the absorption
of vitamin A (retinol) and vitamins D... Read More:
Plant sterols may affect absorption of vitamin E, beta-carotene

ARE WE BEING POISONED?

"Men stumble over the truth
from time to time, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as
if nothing happened"
WINSTON CHURCHILL

The European Commission has reported that an
application by Archer Daniels Midland Corp to add phytosterols
to such consumables as low fat milk, yoghurt, and health food
bars could easily cause consumers to be exposed to levels more
than twice the safe doses. The report is here >>>
>>…
http://europa.eu.int/comm/food/fs/sc/scf/out192_en.pdfand
the findings are at page 5

A new article from "Wise
Traditions" the magazine of Weston A Price Foundation.

TOXINS ON YOUR TOAST

By Valerie James

The latest buzzword in the food industry
is "neutraceuticals," plant-derived substances added to
foods to make them "healthier." This is the food industry's
solution to the problem of sluggish growth and declining profit
margins on processed foods. There's more money in pills containing
"phytonutrients" like indoles or isothiocyanates derived
from broccoli, than in broccoli itself; and more profit from "functional
foods" like "energy bars" with added soy isoflavones
touted as a panacea for everything from menopausal symptoms to osteoroposis,
than from old-fashioned candy bars.

Recently the FDA allowed the industry
the right to add plant-derived sterols to such pedestrian products
as vegetable oil spreads, salad dressings, health drinks, health
bars and yoghurt-type products. These phyto-sterols include beta-sitosterol,
campesterol and stigmasterol, all estrogen-like compounds derived
mostly from wood-pulp effluent. The products will carry a health
label claiming cholesterol-lowering properties, thanks to FDA largesse,
and consumers will pay highly inflated prices for the privilege
of spreading these known toxins on their morning toast.

"We really don't know how
phyto-estrogens act in the human body".

Dr Saffron Whitehead of St Georges Hospital
Medical School, London

ADVERTISING BLITZ

"My father died young,"
says an earnest-looking man on a television commercial. "When
I found out I had a cholesterol problem, I just thought, 'Well,
I'm not waiting around for it to happen to me.' So I started using
Flora ProActiv margarine which actually reduced my cholesterol absorption.
With Flora ProActiv, I'm down from 6.5 to 4.5 in just three weeks.
Now I can do anything I've been wanting to do for years."

Not all consumers watch television.
In fact, those consumers most concerned about their health don't
watch much television at all. They are likely to get their nutrition
information from newspapers and magazines. Nutrition writers have
been quick to comply with their advertisers' wishes with articles
on the virtues of functional foods. And the National Heart, Lung
and Blood Institute's "New Guidelines" for preventing
heart disease recommend the consumption of cholesterol-lowering
margarines and spreads providing 2 grams of sterols or stanols per
day.

The cash registers are ringing up
the dollars; cholesterol-lowering phytosterols are already big business.
Recently, the pharmaceutical giant Novartis sold the licence for
its phytosterol product, Reducol, to Forbes Meditech, Inc. of Canada
for US $4 million despite the fact that these sterols are not even
legal additives in Canada. Predictably, Forbes Meditech is now lobbying
the Canadian government for permission to sell to Canadians, and
on their website they say they are confident that they can soon
build significant sales and can establish a wide and extensive customer
base for these products.

CONSUMER BEWARE

Just what are phytosterols? They
are hormone-like compounds from plants, and they are present in
large numbers in the effluent from the wood pulp business. Canadian,
UK and Scandinavian scientists have shown that water contaminated
with phytosterols causes endocrine damage to fish downstream from
wood-pulp plants. The fish become "sex-inverted" and hermaphroditic;
fertility is also reduced1,2,3,4.
Phytosterols are a problem for wood pulp processors because they
are difficult to remove. For a time, in the 1960s, they were able
to cash in on them, as they were used as a basis for commercial
human sex hormones5. That
use became obsolete as even cheaper sources of waste products, derived
from lanolin in sheep's wool became available! Phytosterols also
have the classic estrogenic effect of stimulating the growth of
uterine tissues, which may explain their folk-loric use as abortifacients6.

There is a remarkable similarity
between the chemical structure of plant sterols and Diethylstilbestrol,
the synthetic hormone associated with reproductive cancers in women7.
This is one reason scientists seriously considered them as natural
anti-fertility agents in place of the modern synthetic contraceptive
pill. This potential usage was abandoned when phytosterols were
found to have similarly harmful side-effects.

The National Research Council of
the US Academy of Sciences has warned about the potential of hormone
exposure to humans from water downstream from paper-mill effluent
outflows8,
noting that these compounds can induce feminization in male fish
and cause the proliferation of breast cancer cells9.
Human studies have shown that phytosterols are also osteolytic10,11,12,13,
meaning that they cause a breakdown of the organic bone matrix,
and the subsequent leaching of the inorganic bone fraction14.
This can lead to a life-threatening condition called hypercalcemia,
where the plasma level of calcium soars, an emergency situation
that occurs in about 40 percent of cancer patients11,15.

All authorities, including the FDA,
should publicly and conspicuously warn consumers that phytosterol-containing
products are unsuitable for pregnant or breastfeeding women, and
for infants and children. This is because they accumulate in the
fetus by transplacental transfer17,18.
As they are fat-soluble, they can be found in breastmilk. Studies
have shown that phyto-sterols have adverse effects in ovarian structures,
and also alter follicular development19;
they work synergistically with the natural hormone estradiol to
promote anabolic effects20, and to alter the sexual balance
of the neonate's brain. It is an accepted axiom that "the hormonal
environment during the critical period exerts permanent organizational
effects that may affect the behavior in adult animals"21.

A recent Editorial in the British
Medical Journal has re-examined the issue of "living in a sea
of estrogens," and suggests "that the apparent increases
in the incidence of certain reproductive conditions may be due to
exposure to chemicals in the environment"22. There
is agreement that the incidence of testicular and prostate cancer
is increasing, and that semen quality is probably worsening in some
regions of the world. The increasing incidence of cryptorchidism
and hypospadias in men and endometriosis and polycystic ovaries
in women is further evidence of the damaging effects of environmental
estrogens. Plant sterols added to margarines will add to this load.

The effect of phytosterols on infants
will be accentuated because they accumulate in blood and tissues
at a rate three- to fivefold above that observed in adults18.
Once absorbed, they can affect not only the hormonal environment,
but can also be deposited in aortic tissues of both infants and
adults, resulting in atherosclerotic lesions17.

Of course, industry interests would
rather we do not know about all this. Stan Correy of the Australian
Broadcasting Company (ABC) comments, "the days of an apple-a-day
to keep the doctor away are over, because the food companies have
to move on from apples to make new profits. To give credibility
to these new products, they use scientists, doctors and people from
the legal professions to speak for them."

NEW ZEALAND FIGHTS BACK

Not all government officials have
bowed to the interests of the food conglomerates. Dr Mark Lawrence
of Australia's Deakin University, formerly head of the Australian
Food Standards Committee, resigned from his post last September
largely because of his concerns about the aggressive targeting of
public officials and consumers by functional food promotions. "The
Food Standards Committee is not able to be vigilant enough because
it is dominated by food industry representatives," he said.
"I found the situation untenable. I and the other public health
nutritionists could not feel confident that public health was going
to take precedence over other dimensions." Later, on Radio
New Zealand, he explained that the Food Standards Committee was
basically dominated by food industry interests, and that they were
relaxing any kind of control over functional foods.

Last September, ABC devoted a full
program to "The Twilight Zone: Medicalizing the Food Supply,"
a program about the marketing of functional foods. Interviewer Stan
Correy reported that the traditional food industry has "hit
the proverbial brick wall. It simply cannot make extra profits by
just selling plain grains, veggies and fruit; it has to find new
ways to tempt consumers to their products. It is no longer credible
for the food to be just delicious, especially if it is full of fat
and bad things. There is nowhere to go but to make it full of supposedly
good things. Think about it: fish oil in ice cream: it increases
your memory; Brocco-bites, that's broccoli in a pill; wood chips
or cholesterol-lowering plant phytosterols in margarine; all part
of the wonderful 'healthy' world of functional food and neutriceuticals."
And of corporate profit motivation.

The ANZFA action sent shock-waves
not only through the Australasian food industries, but around the
world, because food companies hype a positive decision in one country
to other national food safety organizations. The industry initiated
an extensive media campaign, lobbied government officials, and even
made a formal complaint about ANZFA to the Australian Federal Senate.
Despite industry efforts, ANZFA's directive has become law in Australia
and New Zealand, but because of the industry pressure the directive
is only being partially enforced. The forbidden foods have gone
from the market, but the industry has not conformed to the warning
labels and is lobbying for the requirement to be waived.

Amazingly, the industry has touted
the ANZFA directive around the world as a "success." Unilever
launched an advertising blitz in the UK about the "big news"
of the approval to sell its ProActiv product. However, this then
got Unilever into trouble at the UK's Advertising Standards Authority.
In a bitter dispute about which margarine lowers the most cholesterol,
Unilever and Johnson & Johnson, another multi-national, complained
about each other's advertising. The UK Advertising Standards authority
ruled against them both, stating that both corporations had exaggerated
how much their margarines could lower cholesterol

In contrast with this international
activity, the US FDA, a law unto itself, has not limited the sale
and promotion of these "tumor sterols." The FDA has a
unique procedure. It was designed by industry, which lobbied for
its substitution in place of normal GRAS requirements. It is called
"self-determination," meaning that a manufacturer provides
its own evaluation of the "safety" of its product. The
FDA then advertises in the Federal Register, which is not really
a widely read document. If no citizen objects, the FDA rubber stamps
its approval and a multi-million-dollar win is showered on the applicant.
This then becomes the benchmark for every other promotion of similar
products. The US Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CF-SAN
) does not investigate for itself, and there rarely is an objection
because the ultimate consumer does not have a clue about the procedure.
The Weston A. Price Foundation joined us in writing to the FDA to
protest the inclusion of plant-sterol toxins in the food supply,
but the approval was granted anyway. The file reference for the
phytosterol approval is GRN 000061.

DANGEROUS AND ALSO USELESS

In 1990, Dr Petr Skrabanek of Dublin
University commented in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet
on the dogma that cholesterol reduction could extend life23.
He wrote: "There is not a scrap of evidence that it is capable
of changing the risk of dying from coronary heart disease, but there
is reasonable evidence that it does not. The oldest consensus among
the vendors of health, and other traders along the valley of the
shadow of death, is that people want to be deceived and should be
pleased accordingly. In the past, mountebanks were distinguishable
from their more respectable colleagues at least in appearance and
manners, if not by the effectiveness of their cures. Nowadays, the
convergence of medicine and its 'alternatives' is an ominous foretaste."
Dr Skrabanek recommends that "people should temper their faith
in experts-particularly when they see them coming in droves-with
their own informed scepticism."

The food industry believes it has
found the Midas touch of turning dross into gold, but for the trusting
consumer sterol-added products are nothing but fools' gold.

beta-Sitosterol, beta-Sitosterol
Glucoside, and a Mixture of beta-Sitosterol and beta-Sitosterol
Glucoside Modulate the Growth of Estrogen-Responsive Breast Cancer
Cells In Vitro and in Ovariectomized Athymic Mice.

The European Commission has reported that an
application by Archer Daniels Midland Corp to add phytosterols
to such consumables as low fat milk, yoghurt, and health food
bars could easily cause consumers to be exposed to levels more
than twice the safe doses. The report is here http://europa.eu.int/comm/food/fs/sc/scf/out192_en.pdfand
the findings are at page 5

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